TAC SCM Game Description

This is an introduction to the TAC SCM game. The full specification can be found
here.

Background and motivation

Supply chain management is concerned with planning and coordinating the
activities of organizations across the supply chain, from raw material
procurement to finished goods delivery. In today’s global economy,
effective supply chain management is vital to the competitiveness of
manufacturing enterprises as it directly impacts their ability to meet
changing market demands in a timely and cost effective manner.
With annual worldwide supply chain transactions in the trillions of dollars,
the potential impact of performance improvements is tremendous.

While today’s supply chains are essentially static, relying on long-term
relationships among key trading partners, more flexible and dynamic
practices offer the prospect of better matches between suppliers and
customers as market conditions change. Adoption of such practices
has however proven elusive, due to the complexity of many supply
chain relationships and the difficulty in effectively supporting more
dynamic trading practices.

TAC SCM was designed to capture many
of the challenges involved in supporting dynamic supply chain practices,
while keeping the rules of the game simple enough to entice a large
number of competitors to submit entries. The game has been designed
jointly by a team of researchers from the e-Supply Chain Management
Lab at Carnegie Mellon University and the Swedish Institute of Computer
Science (SICS).